Investigators have looked at business dealings, family motives, even the Eddie Munster actor in a Marathon County man's death. But they say 'all roads' now lead to his wife.

Jul. 12, 2013

Police continue to investigate the death of 58-year-old Ken Juedes. He was found shot to death on Aug. 30, 2006, inside his town of Hull home. / Contributed photo

Kenneth Juedes and his wife, Cindy Schulz Juedes, at Country Jam in 2004. / Contributed by Cindy Schulz Juedes

The Ken Juedes File

Date of death: Aug. 30, 2006 Location: H3752 Maple Road in the town of Hull Manner of death: Two gunshot wounds to the chest Anyone with information about the death of Ken Juedes is asked to call Marathon County Sheriff’s Capt. Greg Bean at 715-241-1424 or Division of Criminal Investigation agent Brad Kust at 715-359-7112.

Starting today, Gannett Wisconsin Media is publishing an exclusive four-week series called Cold Cases: Tracking Wisconsin’s Unsolved Murders. Cold Cases is the most comprehensive unsolved murders project of a regional and statewide interest ever assembled in a print and digital format. For more information about the series and what it will include, turn to page 10A.

Ken Juedes was found dead in August 2006 in this town of Hull home. His wife, Cindy Schulz-Juedes, who is considered a person of interest in the case, told police she slept in a trailer the night of his death (pictured on right). / Contributed photo

TOWN OF HULL — Prosecutors and investigators hope a fresh set of eyes finally will lead to the arrest of the person who shot and killed a pharmacist nearly seven years ago in his western Marathon County home.

But they say they’re almost certain who did it.

Ken Juedes, 58, was found dead Aug. 30, 2006 in his bed with two shotgun wounds to the chest. Investigators first believed Juedes was killed by someone with whom he had a financial dispute, but as the investigation continued, their suspicions quickly turned closer to home.

“We had many suspects in the beginning,” Marathon County Sheriff’s Lt. Greg Bean, who has been a primary investigator on the case from the start, said. “In fact, we were pretty sure about who could have done this thing. But the more we looked, the more we were convinced that all roads led to Cindy.”

Juedes’ widow, Cindy Schulz Juedes, told police she found her 58-year-old husband dead in their home on their rural 30-acre property northeast of Unity. Schulz-Juedes left the house the night before the slaying and slept in a trailer adjacent to the home because she had a headache, authorities said. She reported that she found her husband’s body when she returned home at about 8:20 a.m.

Schulz-Juedes is the only one involved in the case who has been formally named by the Marathon County Sheriff’s Department as a person of interest, a label she vehemently denies. At stake, Bean said, were life insurance policies totaling more than $1 million — money Schulz-Juedes said she never received.

“I don’t feel I am a person of interest in my husband’s death,” Schulz-Juedes said. “Most of the money went to the kids. Money-wise, my husband and I together would have earned more in two years than I ever would have gotten from his death, and I still would have had my husband.”

Despite thousands of hours of investigative work, no arrest has been made in the case, and no charges have been filed in a case of bizarre twists and turns that involves complicated financial dealings at a defunct campground, feuding beneficiaries of insurance policies and even the child star who played Eddie Munster on TV in the 1960s.

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Still, investigators insist the case will be solved; agents from the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation are taking a fresh look at the case at the request of the Sheriff’s Department.

“I will never call this a cold case,” Bean said. “Ken’s mother deserves to know who killed her son. I want her to know that someone is paying for this homicide.”

While investigators have clearly focused on Schulz-Juedes’ involvement in the killing, Schulz-Juedes firmly points a finger toward business associates and family members who could have had motive to want Juedes dead.

“If you knew everything I know, with all the legal documents I’ve seen, you’d have a clear picture of who killed my husband, and it wasn’t me,” Schulz-Juedes said. “I don’t care what the police think. I know I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Eddie Munster connection

What an investigator believes and what he can prove can be two very different things. So far, any case against Schulz-Juedes would be largely circumstantial, Bean said. Further complicating matters is an intricate web of financial dealings involving the former Monster Hall Raceway and Campground in Unity, where Juedes was part owner.

“There was a lot of money involved, there were lawsuits, there were disagreements between other business partners,” Bean said. “That whole thing was kind of a mess. This is a very complicated case altogether.”

The murder weapon has not been found, and investigators say they have yet to get the break they need to crack the case. Still, detectives continue to follow up on every lead, including a “confession” by a man who claimed he drove the getaway car when Butch Patrick, the Hollywood actor who portrayed Eddie Munster in the TV series “The Munsters,” shot Juedes. The National Enquirer in May published a story about Patrick’s possible link to the case but has since removed — with no explanation — all mention of the connection on its website.

“We followed up on Butch Patrick but were able to rule him out as a suspect pretty quickly,” Bean said. “It turns out he wasn’t in the area when Ken was killed.”

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Patrick knew Juedes because he regularly visited Monster Hall to give autographs to fans of the show, Bean said.

Another possible break, this time in September, turned into a dead end after a man reported he found two guns — a .20-gauge shotgun and a small-caliber rifle — buried in the Little Eau Pleine River near the Kington Road Bridge in the town of Brighton. The shotgun used to kill Juedes has never been found, but the discovery — roughly six miles from the Juedes home — had investigators hoping they had unearthed a key piece of evidence in the case.

“Oh, we were hopeful,” Bean said. “That call came in at 6:00 at night and I dropped everything.”

Excitement quickly turned to frustration, Bean said, when tests from the Wisconsin Crime Lab confirmed that neither of the newly discovered guns was used in the homicide. The caliber of weapon used in the homicide has never been publicly released.

Missing pieces

So far, prosecutors have declined to file charges against Schulz-Juedes, but Marathon County District Attorney Ken Heimerman remains hopeful that justice will one day be served.

“You don’t charge a homicide unless you have all the pieces of the puzzle,” Heimerman said. “If you try a case too soon, you don’t get a second chance.”

Daily Herald Media has scoured more than 900 pages of interviews and reports related to the case, including dozens of interviews, medical records, autopsy findings and evidence-collection logs. The state Division of Criminal Investigation is now reviewing those same reports, Bean said.

Dana Brueck, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Justice, said the DCI took the case in February at the request of sheriff’s officials. The DCI routinely is asked to review unsolved homicides, Brueck said.

“Our review is designed to look for additional things that could be done to strengthen the case if one is filed,” said Brueck, who declined to comment further on the status of the investigation.

Schulz-Juedes, who was previously unaware that the DCI was taking a new look at the case, said she hasn’t heard from police in “years” and is certain she is not considered a suspect.

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“No one from the state has contacted me,” Schulz-Juedes said. “If the state is investigating the case, I think that’s good news. Maybe I’ll finally get some closure.”

Marathon County Sheriff’s Detective Shawn McCarthy, who was lead investigator on the case before passing the investigation to DCI officials, said the case against Schulz-Juedes is strong but ultimately circumstantial.

“(Schulz-Juedes) is well-versed in guns,” McCarthy said. “One of her two guns is still unaccounted for. She had an encyclopedia on homicide investigations. There were so many things.”

Still, police have found no physical evidence tying Schulz-Juedes to the homicide. A gunshot residue test, which could determine whether she recently had fired a gun, was not performed on Schulz-Juedes the morning her husband’s body was discovered.

Both Bean and McCarthy said there is no single key piece of missing evidence that, if found, could make the case.

“A confession from the doer would be nice,” McCarthy said. “Short of that, you look at the totality of the evidence.”

'Duckling' discrepancy

Bean said the investigation turned up a pattern of lies and deceit that convinced investigators they were on the right track as they continued to focus their investigation on Schulz-Juedes. Schulz-Juedes routinely lied to friends and acquaintances about the details of her life, Bean said. In one example, Schulz-Juedes often claimed to have multiple sclerosis, though her medical records do not indicate she ever suffered from the disease, according to witness statements and medical records obtained by Daily Herald Media through an open records request. In another instance, Schulz-Juedes told friends that an MRI showed “spots on her brain” that might be cancer; test results from an August 2006 MRI showed nothing but minor sinus blockage.

Several witnesses were skeptical of Schulz-Juedes’ claim that she slept in a reportedly “bug-infested” trailer the night of the slaying, according to police reports. Multiple witnesses said Schulz-Juedes refused to sleep in the trailer when the vehicle was parked at the Monster Hall Campground and found it difficult to believe she ever would willingly set foot in it, much less sleep there, according to witness statements.

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But Schulz-Juedes said she and her husband had recently cleaned up the trailer, nicknamed “the duckling,” and that the vehicle was a clean, comfortable place to rest. Plus, Schulz-Juedes said, she had another reason for sleeping in “the duckling” on the night of her husband’s death.

The couple fostered a number of troubled teenage boys in their home; one of the boys, who had been staying with a parent temporarily, was expected to return to the Juedes’ home that night, she said.

“I can prove why I slept in ‘the duckling’ that night,” Schulz-Juedes said. “Ken told me to hunker down and get some rest, because if (the boy) came home that night he would have been screaming and yelling and disruptive, because that’s the way things are with these kids. I was on medication and needed my rest.”

In initial interviews with police, there is no indication Schulz-Juedes mentioned the boy’s expected return.

“I know some people question why I would have slept in ‘the duckling,’ but that’s where I was,” Schulz-Juedes said. “Some people wonder why I didn’t sleep in one of the other bedrooms in the house. I can tell you why. When you have (foster) placements, those rooms belong to those kids.”

According to police records, there were no foster children placed in the home after Aug. 24, 2006 — nearly a week before Juedes’ death.

Bean said despite a mountain of evidence in the case, there is still no “smoking gun” that proves Schulz-Juedes is the killer.

“I know what we believe, but the case is a prosecutor’s nightmare,” Bean said.

Money trail

Family members of Juedes, who worked as a pharmacist at Memorial Health Center in Medford, are waiting for answers and for justice.

The Juedes children think Schulz-Juedes orchestrated her husband’s death so she could collect more than $1 million in insurance money and cash from property sales, according to court documents.

A wrongful death lawsuit filed in 2007 that centered around a $300,000 insurance payout to Schulz-Juedes, which was contested by Juedes’ four children, was resolved in August 2010 when the children came to an agreement with Schulz-Juedes. The case was scheduled to go to trial in October 2011, and investigators hoped the trial would reveal evidence that would help them seal a prosecution.

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The four children split $212,500 of the $300,000, and Schulz-Juedes was given the rest, according to the terms of the settlement. Schulz-Juedes also was the beneficiary of an additional estimated $700,000 in various life insurance policies, according to police records.

“Over the course of time since the death of Kenneth E. Juedes, it was learned that Cindy S. Schulz-Juedes has benefited from the sale of land as well as the proceeds from at least one life insurance policy,” McCarthy wrote in a supplemental police report dated September 2008.

But Schulz-Juedes insists she gained little from her husband’s death.

“When all the bills were paid, I got a check for $265.57 from the estate,” Schulz-Juedes said. “That’s it.”

Schulz-Juedes said she was eager to settle the lawsuit after her probate attorney was given new and “disturbing” information about her husband’s death. Schulz-Juedes declined to share the details of the information her attorney received, but said she was, for a time, in fear for her life.

“I was under police protection at that point,” Schulz-Juedes said. “I finally said, just give (the money) to the kids.”

Daily Herald Media has so far been unable to confirm whether Schulz-Juedes was under police protection at any point since her husband’s death.

A family haunted

Schulz-Juedes, who now lives in Chippewa Falls, said she has not remarried and has no interest in pursuing new relationships.

“No, I have not moved on,” Schulz-Juedes said. “I’m just getting to the point where I can open a closed door without thinking I’m going to find what I found that day — my husband’s body.”

Ken Juedes’ sister, Laurie Juedes, lives in the state of Washington and has made several visits to Wisconsin in recent years to meet with investigators and gather her own evidence for the civil case. Laurie Juedes is sharply critical of local investigators and said she has become increasingly frustrated with police and prosecutors.

“There are serious problems in the investigation,” Laurie Juedes said. “I am not at all satisfied that the Sheriff’s Department did their job. Someone killed my brother, and we don’t know who to be afraid of.”

Prosecutors are awaiting the DCI report before making a final charging decision in the case. So far, investigators have failed to convince DA Heimerman that the case could successfully be brought to trial.

“I know that the Sheriff’s Department has continued to work this case, and I know we would all like a resolution,” Heimerman said. “A new set of eyes can be a good idea.”

Schulz-Juedes is convinced that any charges filed in the case won’t be filed against her. Instead, she believes investigators are targeting someone else involved in the case — someone she refuses to name.

“I don’t want to jeopardize the investigation by telling you what I know,” Schulz-Juedes said. “But I know (investigators) aren’t looking at me.”

Attempts to reach Terry L. Moore, an Eau Claire attorney who represented Schulz-Juedes in the civil case, were not successful.